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Abstract

Nowadays, the daily work of many research communities is characterized by an increasing amount and complexity of data. This makes it increasingly difficult to manage, access and utilize to ultimately gain scientific insights based on it. At the same time, domain scientists want to focus on their science instead of IT. The solution is research data management in order to store data in a structured way to enable easy discovery for future reference. An integral part is the use of metadata. With it, data becomes accessible by its content instead of only its name and location. The use of metadata shall be as automatic and seamless as possible in order to foster a high usability.

Here we present the architecture and initial steps of the MASi project with its aim to build a comprehensive research data management service. First, it extends the existing KIT Data Manager framework by a generic programming interface and by a generic graphical web interface. Advanced additional features includes the integration of provenance metadata and persistent identifiers. The MASi service aims at being easily adaptable for arbitrary communities with limited effort. The requirements for the initial use cases within geography, chemistry and digital humanities are elucidated. The MASi research data management service is currently being built up to satisfy these complex and varying requirements in an efficient way.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Richard Grunzke conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Volker Hartmann conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Thomas Jejkal conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Ajinkya Prabhune conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Hendrik Herold conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Aline Deicke conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Alexander Hoffmann conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Torsten Schrade conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Gotthard Meinel conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Sonja Herres-Pawlis conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Rainer Stotzka conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Wolfgang E. Nagel conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

This is an outlook with the code being in an early stage and, thus, not ready for publication.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (MASi), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig) and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (LSDMA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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